November 2013

November 30, 2013

Waiters and waitresses, I'm done believing your stories of ---ists leaving unbelievably nasty messages in lieu of tips. I got stiffed from time to time, you will be too. Suck it up and stop making up bullshit stories about ists who hate you, hoping that your prevarication will go viral. Viral prevarications are bad, especially if you are putting yourself out as a victimized member of a disadvantaged group, because fair or not, you taint the whole group when you get busted.

And media, stop reporting on this stuff. It's not news even if it proves true. It's only news when it becomes a story and it's found to be bullshit. And that's not the story you were looking for, was it?

November 27, 2013

Waiters and waitresses, I'm done believing your stories of ----ists leaving unbelievably nasty messages in lieu of tips. I got stiffed from time to time, you will be too. Suck it up and stop making up bullshit stories about ists who hate you, hoping that your prevarication will go viral. Viral prevarications are bad, especially if you are putting yourself out as a victimized member of a disadvantaged group, because fair or not, you taint the whole group when you get busted.

And media, stop reporting on this stuff. It's not news even if it proves true. It's only news when it becomes a story and it's found to be bullshit. And that's not the story you were looking for, was it?

I because suspicious when I read that the waitress was raking in profits from sympathetic donors and saw her writing embellishments like "It took everything I had to no spit in their food." Yeah, except you bring the food first, THEN they eat it, THEN you give them the bill and THEN, if they stiff you and insult you, you find out about it. No food to spit in.

November 16, 2013

John was on the side of the road hitchhiking on a very dark night and in the midst of a big storm. The night was rolling on and no car went by. The storm was so strong he could hardly see a few feet ahead of him. Suddenly, he saw a car slowly coming towards him and stopped.

Desperate for shelter and without thinking about it, he got into the car and closed the door, only to realize there was nobody behind the wheel and the engine wasn't on. The car started moving slowly. John looked at the road ahead and saw a curve approaching. Terrified, he started to pray, begging for his life. Just before the car hit the curve, a hand appeared out of nowhere through the window and turned the wheel. John, paralyzed with terror, watched as the hand came through the window, but never touched or harmed him.

A few minutes later, John noticed the lights of a pub down the road, so he jumped out of the car and ran to it as fast as he could, never even looking back. Wet and out of breath, he rushed inside and told everybody about the horrible experience he had just had. A silence enveloped the pub when everybody realized he was crying and sober.

Suddenly, the pub doors opened, and two soaking wet men walked in. They spotted John sobbing at the bar.

"Look, Paddy," one said to the other. It's that feckin' idiot that got in the car while we were pushing it!"

November 13, 2013

Great article in the OC Register today about the movement to bring college football back to Cal State Fullerton. Link here. I've pledged not to donate to the university again until Titan football returns. Unfortunately for me, that meant giving up my courtside seats for Titan basketball.

November 09, 2013

Told my kids that back in the day, we had no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Vine. If we wanted our friends to see our lunch, take a photo, drop the film off for developing, pick it up days later, then go to all our friends' houses to show it to them.

November 08, 2013

"Actually, any insurance that you currently have would be grandfathered
in so you could keep. And so you could decide not to get in the exchange
the better plan -- I could keep my Acme insurance, just a
high-deductible catastrophic plan -- I would not be required to get the
better one. If I chose to get the better one, it would be 14 to 20
percent cheaper than if I were going into the individual market. I just
wanted to clarify that issue."

(start watching around 1:12:48)

Every word of it was pure fantasy. He's a smart guy. There's no way he
said this out of naivete or any other form of sincere belief. He knew
this was BS. He knew that for a lot of people, this was not going to be
true, because the whole system is built upon forcing young and healthy
people to pay more for their health plans. If you are young and healthy,
and had a "bare bones" plan because it was a more efficient health care financial plan than wasting a bunch of money on more insurance than you need,
your ability to keep your plan was doomed under the structure of
Obamacare, and you were destined to have to pay more going forward. In
some cases, a lot more.

"No matter what you heard" ... unless you heard something truthful and thorough.

"Let me repeat this" ... because if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

"Let me be perfectly clear" ... not honest, but clear.

"We will keep this promise to the American people" ... or else we will apologize and that will be that.

I hope I never hear Barack Obama try to assure me that if I like my spouse and want to keep my spouse, I can keep my spouse.

Just over the last week, evidence of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) presenting others’ work as his own has come to public light over and over and over and over and over again. This afternoon, Andrew Kaczynski found yet another instance in which part of the senator’s most recent book plagiarized an article from Forbes magazine.

With new revelations popping up at least once a day, the Kentucky Republican decided to address the controversy by talking to the New York Times.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who in recent weeks has had to explain a
series of plagiarism charges, said in an interview Tuesday that he was
being held to an unfair standard, but that there would be an office
“restructuring” to prevent future occurrences.

Sitting in a conference room in his Senate office complex, Mr. Paul,
drawn and clearly shaken by the plagiarism charges, offered a mix of
contrition and defiance…. Acknowledging that his office had “made
mistakes,” he said he was putting a new system in place to ensure that
all of his materials are properly footnoted and cited.

The quotes in the Times piece are remarkable, in that it seems
the senator feels put upon – as if having to play by the same rules as
high-school kids who are taught not to present others’ work as their
own is some kind of imposition.
“What we are going to do from here forward, if it will make people
leave me the hell alone, is we’re going to do them like college
papers,” Paul told the Times.

Dear MSNBC. I think Rand Paul may have said that in comic sans.

Plagiarism is the "wrongful appropriation" and "purloining and
publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or
expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work.1/

But not every collection of words is worthy of being considered "an
author's language, thoughts, ideas or expressions." Sometimes, they are
just recitations of fact that can't be usefully expressed in much more
than one way. And not all appropriations are "wrongful" and constitute
purloining.

In a speech, an introductory sentence saying what a
movie is about is not "presenting others' work as your own." If you ask
me what Gattaca was, and I cut and paste from Wikipedia, I am not
claiming that what I responded with is an original work of authorship.
The only part of this whole "scandal" that I agree with is the criticism
of using extended, unattributed quotes in his book. That is probably not cool. I say probably because I wasn't sufficiently intrigued to read the lifted passages or ponder whether they should be considered an instance of purloined authorship.

Even then, I
don't really like the obsession over attribution, particularly as to
small passages or generic descriptive statements. I find it tedious, as a
reader or listener, to hear people say "as so-and-so said" or "as
so-and-so wrote in his book "The Thingamajig". How annoying would it be
to read an article about Death Valley that began with "Death Valley is a
desert valley located in Eastern California. Situated within the Mojave
Desert, it is the lowest, hottest and driest area in North America,
according to its Wikipedia page" ? Pretty annoying, in my opinion.